Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce Trade Winds, our first solo exhibition with Hugh Scott-Douglas, featuring a new series of UV cured inkjet and resin printed canvases and a recent digital video work. Scott-Douglas works from a studio space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an urban industrial park with a long varied history of changing roles ranging from naval shipyard to film studio lot. Reflecting on this environment, he began researching the global shipping trade and found a mapping software able to track all thoroughfare of sea transport. Utilizing the capabilities of the program in a manner different from the software’s intent, Scott-Douglas isolates the environmental conditions in each location – which appear as real-time graphemes of lines, arrows, and triangles – by removing all of the boats from the water. Specific to current, wind, and wave directions, these symbols are mapping the shifting conditions of the various trade routes, and become the basis of his artworks in layers of printed ink and resin.

Throughout Scott-Douglas’s practice are motifs concerning an interest in systems of value, and the deconstruction of protocols and symbols. This can be seen in his previous series, such as: Chopped Bills and Torn Cheques (2013-2014), his folded billboard sculptures (2014) and a set of prints derived from the interior workings of watches in 2015. With his latest body of work, Scott-Douglas approaches similar queries.

Guided by a composite image of a thousand global satellites, each composition is an abstraction representing a different commercial shipping route. The individual artwork’s titles, such as Bossa Nova (a journey from Salvador, Brazil to Tangier, Morocco) refer to the names of these naval thoroughfares. The artworks are created by zooming in on a specific oceanic area and removing the naval vessels from the coded mapping system. In a multi-phase process, the artist creates aerial maps with their own individual color schemes. Then with the aid of an industrial printer, a process akin to silkscreening is employed to render each image in its layers where current, wind, and wave directions are frozen, one on top of the next, as if time has collapsed into a perpetual present.

Alongside the canvas prints, Scott-Douglas presents Shudder, a 2-minute looped, digital video that considers the measurement of an amorphous form, air. With a camera attached on top of an air compressor and aimed at the artist’s studio floor, the compressor is activated and begins to shake aggressively, creating wild gestures within the frame. Filmed also from an aerial perspective, what is experienced is the compressor filling with air in order to reach full pressure. When the compressor reaches its capacity and stops intaking air, the camera for a moment becomes still. In those few final seconds, the viewer can clearly see Scott-Douglas’ studio floor before the cycle repeats and the image becomes amorphous again. From hypnotic blur to splattered studio floor, the video documents the transition of nebulous air into controlled and measured units and imparts a tangibility to that which often goes unnoticed.

At the 2016 edition of the Paris FIAC Art Fair, Applicat-Prazan will be presenting the historical and
eternal, monumental and timeless work of Zoran Music (1909-2005). Born in Gorizia (Frioul) in 1909, Zoran Music was deported to Dachau in 1944 because he was a resistant. At the risk of his life, he drew 200 sketches which described what he saw there: scenes of hangings, crematorium ovens, piles of corpses, that is to say, the inconceivable. Many years after his return, in the 1970’s, the artist painted a series of works entitled “We are not the last” in which he depicts the horror of the camps in the silence of the unspeakable. Zoran Music died on the 25th May 2005 in Venice. His paintings are held in most of the great museums the world over.

Composed of 17 paintings, this exhibition brings to light two series of his works which fascinate the
gallery. “We are not the last” consists of 10 acrylic paintings on canvas executed between 1970 and
1974, and his major later works of the 1990’s, in which he reveals his inner realm, approaching his
own end.

On this occasion, Applicat-Prazan and the publisher Skira have co-edited a magnificent catalogue
created by Communic’Art, in which three authors pay tribute to the work of Zoran Music, each
expressing themselves freely in their own manner. After contemplating the paintings, Boualem Sansal, Pascal Bruckner and Michaël Prazan have composed vibrant texts on the life and work of Zoran Music. Each, in his own style, with his personal sensitivity, has written a text addressing
the themes of life, death, the monumentality of this work, human tragedy, History and the issue of the duty of remembrance. Each of the authors concludes with references to contemporary barbarity and the tragedy of current events.

Cardi Gallery, Milan is glad to present Mimmo Rotella. Blanks, an exhibition dedicated to a selection of works produced by Mimmo Rotella from the beginning of 1980s.

If with the décollages, realized tearing posters taken directly from the street, the artist had discovered the infinite possibilities of the popular image, with the blanks (also called ‘coperture’) he set out to explore the temporal and linguistic limits of this mode of communication.
The street and the city were once again sources of inspiration for the artist that, wondering around Milan, discovered that the posters were covered up by monochrome pieces of paper when the time of their display on the city walls was over. Fascinated by the hidden message, obliterated by a quite anonymous paper, he started to create the blanks: a procedure that cancel the chaos, the disorder, the superimposition shown with the décollage covering them with a new skin made up of monochrome tissue paper revealing the infinite possibilities of colour, of transparency and of the essential act.

The majority of the blanks were created in the beginning of 1980s by sticking large monochrome – black, white and coloured – sheets of paper onto old and disused advertising hoardings. Right at the beginning of that decade Rotella left Paris and moved for good to Milan. He had a new studio and began to forge new links with the city and its streets. The ‘coperture’ were the starting-point for his subsequent research, marked by for a return to the image through an approach influenced by the graffiti language.
The blanks were shown for the first time in Milan in January 1981. Since then these works have been exhibited on very few occasions. So Cardi Gallery is trying to fill this gap and presenting to the public a little-known but crucial aspect of Mimmo Rotella’s production.

A catalogue, that is the first publication to be devoted entirely to the subject, accompanies the show and we believe it bodes well, and can be an excellent point of departure, for future studies of this series of works. The exhibition Mimmo Rotella, Blanks is part of “Mimmo Rotella 2016” an initiative linked to the tenth anniversary of the passing of Mimmo Rotella. It involves a number of galleries and institutions in Milan, witnessing the relationship between the artist and the city where he worked and lived in his last years.
The initiative is realized in collaboration with Mimmo Rotella Institute, set up in 2012 by Inna and Aghnessa Rotella with the aim of compiling the catalogue raisonné, improving understanding of the figure and the art of Mimmo Rotella and promoting his work at the national and international level. The Mimmo Rotella Institute is directed by Antonella Soldaini with the scientific support of Veronica Locatelli.

With this show Cardi Gallery confirms once again its interest for national and international historical artists.

Mimmo Rotella (Catanzaro, 1918 - Milan, 2006) is an artist renowned internationally for the invention, in 1953, of the technique of décollage. During his long career, he experimented with multiple artistic techniques, broaden his own linguistic and formal horizons: besides the décollage, he realized retro d’affiches, collages, photographic reproduction, artypos, frottages, effaçages, blanks, sovrapitture and sculptures.
Restless and histrionic, in the first years of the 1940s he moved to Rome where he emerged in the environment linked to the new abstract avantgarde. In 1960 he took part in the group of the Nouveaux Réalistes.
After participating in the Venice Biennale in 1964 with a personal room, he decided to move to Paris, where he interwove important relationships with critics and artists. In 1968 he lived for a brief period in the Chelsea Hotel in New York; once back in Europe he started travelling to India and Japan. In 1972 his first autobiography was published Autorotella. Autobiografia di un artista. In 1974 Tommaso Trini edited the first in-depth monographic book on the career of the artist. Back in Milan in 1980, he started to create the blanks or ‘coperture’. In 1984 he went back to figurative with the series of works on acrylic on canvas and, in 1986, of the sovrapitture, In the first years of the 1990s he made some sculptures and went back to décollage that began to reach monumental dimensions. In the 1990s and 2000s he received recognitions and national and international awards. In 2000 he established the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella, currently chaired by Rocco Guglielmo and directed by Piero Mascitti; in 2005 he opened his home-museum in Catanzaro, called ‘Casa della Memoria’. Still in full activity, he died on January 8th, 2006 in Milan.